At best, that only gives you part of the story.
Yes, you’ll have a good idea of how well your product function is performing, but you’re unlikely to have any idea how that performance translates into impact for your customers and your business.
And, ultimately, building products that have no impact on your customers is a waste of time, however well you’re doing it.
Here we encounter the second problem with the measurement-management equation. All too often in a kind of Gresham’s law (which said bad money drives out good), the easy-to-measure drives out the hard, even when the latter is more important.
That doesn’t mean you can’t measure the success of your product, though. It just means you need to think carefully about what you should be measuring.
Instead of searching for metrics, start by thinking about the change you’ll see in your customers’ behaviour if your product or feature is successful, then work backwards to find a proxy metric you can use to evidence that change:
